This year’s Climate Week NYC once again brought together leaders from finance, law, climate, and policy to tackle the toughest questions in global decarbonization. AlliedOffsets was proud to contribute, with our team, Antonia, Emily, James and Lars - present at a range of panels and discussions across the week.
Antonia on Carbon as a Financial Asset
Our own Antonia Drummond joined Northern Trust and Faegre Drinker on stage at the ‘Law & Carbon Order: Digital Carbon Assets Unit’ event. The conversation centered around the idea of: what if the next major asset class wasn’t real estate or tech, but carbon itself?
Antonia highlighted the realities of today’s voluntary carbon markets:
- The market remains small relative to decarbonization needs.
- Demand-side challenges include trust gaps, price transparency issues, and a lack of compliance incentives.
- Supply-side challenges include inefficiencies, financial risk on developers, and limited financing options.
She also shared AlliedOffsets forecasts showing the market could expand 5x to 80x by 2050, potentially reaching $165 billion in value. During the panel, the discussion centered around how the key to unlocking that growth could lie in digitization and financialization: creating transparent, digital infrastructure, integrating carbon into mainstream finance, and building the legal frameworks to support it.
Emily & James: Broader Climate Week Reflections
Alongside Antonia, Emily and James from the AlliedOffsets team attended a wide range of sessions during Climate Week NYC. The week was marked by strong turnout, with most events filled to capacity. Several key themes emerged:
- High-integrity, nature-based removals are increasingly seen as a corporate focus, with actors such as Meta and the Symbiosis Coalition leading the conversation.
- New financial, technological, and legal tools are being developed to streamline due diligence and make market participation easier and less risky for buyers.
- Supply-side fragmentation is growing as different quality benchmarks, including CCP and CORSIA, gain traction.
- In the U.S. market, forestry and methane/abandoned oil well projects show signs of saturation, but also encouraging signals of further development.
